Monday, September 12, 2011

Krugman's Controversial Comments on 9/11

After some perusing through current event and political op-ed articles today, I discovered an unsettling statement made by Donald Rumsfeld, former White House chief of staff and four-time Congressman, that goes as follows:

After reading Krugman's repugnant piece on 9/11, I cancelled my subscription to the New York Times this AM.

This, of course, was in response to Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman's comments on 9/11 in a blog post entitled "The Years of Shame." I was trying to find out what exactly made his comments "un-American" and "hateful," as so vehemently accused by many right-wing pundits. I can obviously see how these people would misconstrue what he was trying to say, being the neocons that they are, but it does not take away from the fact that the pure hatred for this post is disturbing. If anything, I thought Paul Krugman was dead-on in his post.

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

He ends his post saying that he will not be allowing comments for obvious reasons. How deeply disconcerting is this? Paul was not slandering victims of 9/11 or belittling the affects of the tragedy in any way. Of course, part of the problem lies with the fact that GOP does not want to believe that any non-Americans were just as much victims of this violence as our own American families. It is completely insane to believe that our government committed these atrocities for justice. Just because we don’t literally fly planes into buildings does not mean that we are not just as much terrorists as those who committed the atrocious crimes against our people. Your true character is how you act under pressure. You cannot preach about “loving your enemies” and then go blow them up.

For the sake of the GOP opinion on this matter, if we had focused these wars on going after Osama, the story would be different, but we didn’t. We invaded Iraq which had nothing to do with 9/11 at all. This was undoubtedly a diversion. You cannot think that people do not realize what you are doing just because you spew 9/11 propaganda at everyone. What happened to our people on 9/11 was utterly appalling, but using it as a propaganda tool for your own self-interests is just as awful, in my opinion.